


what a world you have made here

by thisstableground



Series: less than ninety degrees [5]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Autism, Family, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Usnavi and Vanessa are discussed but don't appear onscreen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-04 21:45:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15156260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Estefanía Marcado isn't sure what she imagined raising a child to be like, but she's fairly certain she couldn't have predicted a single thing about her son.[set pre/during DNH canon through early UVR. Estefanía's POV. warnings in end notes.][1988-2016]





	what a world you have made here

**Author's Note:**

> [a/n: this was going to be a very quick cute "ruben tells his mom he's dating vanessa and usnavi" fic. it turned into a lot of not that before we get to that part. 
> 
> ends happy, but check the end notes because it's not always sunshine time for the marcados before that.]

The baby comes four days early but very healthy at seven pounds and one ounce. Estefanía remembers those things because there’s a piece of paper officially telling her. Between the epidural and the effort and the exhaustion she doesn’t remember much else even minutes afterwards, which she suspects is probably wired into the design so that mothers aren’t put off after their first because she’s certain it would be a grotesque memory if she cared to try and recall it. Which she doesn’t. She’s sharply aware of one thing and only one: her son, newly born, newly clean-ish, being put into her arms.

“Oh, _mira_ ,” Estefanía says. She can’t remember any of the things she imagined this moment to be. All she can think about is how much newborns look like little baby pugs, the way their faces are all wrinkled up and squashed before their skin fits them right. She already loves him more than she’ll ever be able to comprehend. “It’s my Rubén.”

***

Having a child has been unfathomable from day one: how can something so small be so full of life? How can she have created this person from her own body, her own blood? 

The things she doesn’t understand about him only grow as he does. 

The wondrous ones: how is he walking already? How will she ever stop being so amazed at seeing him grow? How can something so perfect as her own son exist?

And the worrying ones. He learns to say a few sentence fragments and then apparently decides he’s got enough to get by on and sticks with those. He won’t ever look anyone in the eye, gazing dreamily off into nothing like they aren’t even there. Certain fabrics, light touches, unexpected noises make him scream and sob and scratch at himself as though he’s covered in fireants. 

Estefanía was the youngest sibling growing up. She’s not used to toddlers. _They’re delicate things_ , she thinks to herself, _perhaps this is just what they’re all like_.

It carries on right through his third year and she keeps telling herself it’s probably something he’ll grow out of with increasing desperation until one day, Ruben’s daycare teacher has a quiet word with her when she comes to pick him up

She doesn’t understand this either, nor what the doctors tell her later after all the appointments and tests and talking. She can comprehend what they’re _saying_ to her, she’s heard of autism spectrum conditions, she’s got two ears and a brain to listen to all the explanations. What she can’t comprehend is how this could happen to her family. And there’s a million questions. Will he get better? Will he ever learn to talk more? Will things be okay?

“There’s no cure, but the condition _can_ be managed,” the doctor says. “With proper support and therapy Rubén can live a happy life.”

When her husband returns from work that evening, Estefanía explains everything the doctor said. Tomas reads through the information with an ever-deepening frown. Ruben lies on the floor and sweeps his hands over the carpet like he’s making a belly-down snow angel.

Tomas exhales loudly as he finishes the last pamphlet. “There must be something we can do.”

“They said there’s no cure,” she says. She feels numb.

Ruben, still on the carpet, seems totally unconcerned by the tension from their side of the living room. Sometimes he does this game for so long they have to stop him because the friction starts chafing his skin raw.

“I’m going for a walk,” Tomas says, standing. “I can’t deal with this right now.”

That’s what life becomes, over the next three or four weeks. Tomas goes out for more long walks, or to bars, or to a friend’s house. Estefanía stays home and deals with follow-up and watches her son through these new eyes, as though he’s a stranger in her house. Tries to picture his future and can’t seem to see anything past the million questions she can’t bring herself to ask anyone aloud: what does this mean for his life? Will he be able to leave home, go to college, fall in love? Will his eyes always look so far away to something Estefanía can’t see?

She grieves, as subtly as possible, for the son she thought she had. All her dreams and hopes and ideas, she’d been so certain. Ruben in the background gathers all his soft toys into one place, surveys the pile with his chubby fists planted on his hips, the bearing of a boy about to undertake a very serious task.

“¿Qué juego?” she asks, out of habit.

“Grande,” Ruben answers, and accordingly begins the important process of sorting all of them all out in ascending height order.

Her husband hasn’t come home yet, though he was due in from work two hours ago. A few friends have started to gently suggest that he might be finding his entertainment with other ladies rather than going to any of the places he says he goes. Estefanía insists he just needs time to think, finds herself thinking that she doesn’t care where he is, only that he’s not here with them like he’s supposed to be. This isn’t the way she’d pictured a family to be.

A light, soft weight against her hand. She looks down, startled. Ruben is there, earnestly pressing a stuffed giraffe into her hands. His eyes are fixed somewhere past her shoulder at the blank wall behind.

“Para mamá,” he says, one of the first phrases he learned, one of his most used. 

The giraffe is one of his favorites. She knows this not because he’s told her directly but because sometimes he lines them up according to how much he likes them at that particular moment and it’s always somewhere in the top three. “¿Qué juego?” she’ll ask, and he’ll say “mejor”.

Estefanía laughs, the sharp sudden way you laugh when you realize in a flash how stupid you’re being. Who has she been grieving for? Some imaginary child when her boy is right here? Who is she looking for when this is her Ruben just as he’s always been? It’s like being given a heartfelt gift and instead of saying _thank you_ saying _but I asked for a different one, take it back._

Ruben in the background kicks his now-giraffeless line of toys around the room exuberantly then starts re-organizing them by color. _And why not,_ Estefanía thinks. _It’s as much of a game as anything else, if you think about it. And at least it’s easy to tidy up afterwards._

She was never raised to be ungrateful and there’s everything here to be grateful for. It’s a breath of relief, and she prays forgiveness for her doubt, because for all his oddities she wouldn’t trade him for anything. So what if he never goes to college? So what if he never leaves home? All that matters is that Ruben is happy.

***

Ruben isn’t happy.

They’d planned to raise him in Puerto Rico but plans have changed. They move to the states eight months before he’s due to start school, hoping for better support, better services, a better future for their child, because isn’t that always the story? 

In Philadelphia, often there are good days, though it takes them a while to adapt enough to find them. Their house is bigger than the one in Vega Alta. There’s plenty to do around the area. Estefanía takes Ruben on little day-trips at the weekend, to museums, to libraries, to parks. She wants him to learn to enjoy the world. 

Some days it takes hours to get him out of the house. Some days they have to leave as soon as they arrive somewhere, some days they don’t even get out of the door at all. But those aren’t things that make her think he’s unhappy. Don’t all parents have days where their children are tired and cranky and a day out turns into a shouting mess? Children are so new and the world is so big to them. Ruben knows so much about it already, it’s no wonder he gets overwhelmed more easily, carrying all that information around with him.

He knows an impossible amount, for a five year old boy. And he always wants to learn more, that _why?_ phase continuing a long time. It’s tiring sometimes but it seems to help him on his way through the world, because he speaks more, in his uneven way, he can talk for hours at a time if you catch him with the right subject so she always answers his questions when she can. It’s alarming how fast he’s asking ones that she struggles to understand not because he lacks the vocabulary but because in some areas he seems to vastly outpace her own. But there’s always the library.

On good days, they walk around a museum and Ruben sings over and over a song about elements, not stumbling in the slightest over the pronunciation of words like _molybdenum_ or _praseodymium_.

“Tell me about praso…dymum,” she says.

“Praseodymium. Symbol Pr. Atomic number 59. Third in the lanthanide series. Rare earth metal. They make yellow with it,” he says, and, having imparted his knowledge, sits on the ground very decisively as if to say _class dismissed_.

“Tired?” she asks.

“On the floor,” he replies, with the exact same wise tone that he’d just used for the phrase _third in the lanthanide series_ which means absolutely nothing to Estefanía but she doesn’t doubt he’s right.

“What an odd little duck he is,” she thinks, her heart full of love. “What a clever little thing.”

On the good days, Ruben is happy with Estefanía. Doubt lingers. A boy should have more company than his own mother. He never pays an inch of attention to whoever she sets up playdates with. Instead he’ll play Carpet Time or Organizing Things or Ruben Has Crawled Underneath The Seat Cushion Of The Couch And Is Lying There Quietly. They are not multiplayer games. He’s never shown an interest when she asks if there’s any friends from kindergarten he wants to bring home for dinner.

They spend his sixth and seventh birthdays at her brother’s place so that Ruben can spend some time with his cousin, who is a year younger and extremely rambunctious with a tendency to draw on anything he can get his hands on including occasionally Ruben, but he’s very kind-hearted, and Ruben seems to enjoy being around him in a bemused way. Estefanía couldn’t face asking if he wanted to invite anyone to a birthday party when she knows what his answer will be.

The doctor says that perhaps it’s still culture shock making his social and language delays more pronounced. On his suggestion, they try creating clearer boundaries between Ruben’s Spanish and his English. She puts her foot down about being exclusively English-speaking only, but now Spanish is just for the home, and Spanglish is off the table. His grammar in both, she’ll admit, does seem to improve after several months, with him using full sentences far more often. She doesn’t show that it breaks her heart when he starts pronouncing his name as Ruben the way his teachers do instead of Rubén the way she does, even at home.

It does make her wonder if perhaps Ruben isn’t in fact a mystery to be solved or the only one who needs to learn: what they really have here is a mutual language barrier despite linguistic similarities, like listening to European Portuguese when all you know is Puerto Rican Spanish, not impossible but not fluent. He speaks Ruben as a first language and she does not. They’re working on the translations.

Doubt still lingers. Ruben isn’t happy, or at least, she thinks he isn’t. It’s hard to tell by any measure other than instinct. Estefanía is ashamed of how long it takes her to realize that by looking so hard at Ruben to find the source of his discontent she’s missed the real problem by a mile.

A month after Ruben turns seven, they come home from the museum. Tomas didn’t join them. He never does. He says he works all week and has earned a right to a quiet weekend. Estefanía thinks, as she often does, that she also works during the week _and_ appears to be the one expected to do the majority of the parenting and household duties but it seems pointless to make a fuss when this is the way they’ve always been.

Ruben doesn’t seem bothered when it’s just the two of them, anyway, nor is he bothered that they’ve been here a thousand times. He’s having a dinosaur phase at the moment and got so overexcited about them that eventually he stopped being able to tell her facts. Instead he’s just been picking out names to repeat in awe, fractured like now that they’re in the car and he can’t see all the bones and the diagrams the names are the only thing he can take apart to analyze in component segments. His hands move through the air like he’s moving the pieces around. “Brachiosaurus. Break-eeee-oh-saw-us. Brachee-osauris.”

By the time they get home it’s started to get grating, truth be told. But he’s only talking quietly and it seems to be keeping him calm when sometimes transitioning from Day Out to At Home stresses him out, so she lets him wander in his little circle and tunes the sound out while she mentally runs through the contents of the fridge and tries to decide whether the ground beef or the chicken needs using first.

Tomas presses his fingers to his temples, sighing as though he’s had a long day. Estefanía notes idly that he waited for her to be back so she could make dinner when there’s plenty of time for him to have made a start on it himself. He says, “we get the point, Rubén.”

“Brek-iosurrus.”

“ _Rubén_.”

“Brayyy-chee-oh—“

“Rubén, I said shut _up_! _”_

“Tomas!” Estefanía admonishes. Too late. Ruben abruptly stops pacing his circle, mouth snapping closed.

“Ay, eso está mejor,” Tomas mutters, and turns the television up.

Better than what? Ruben’s standing statue-still and silent like someone pressed a pause button on him. _He wasn’t doing anything other than keeping himself busy,_ Estefanía thinks.

There’s no reason for it to be different this time, but somehow it is. This time, she says, because it’s nowhere near the first. Just like that a door is open that reveals just how often Tomas tells Ruben to shut up when he’s excited or happy or crying, and how he snaps at him when he can’t talk at all, the confused look on Ruben’s face while he tries to figure out which mood he’s trying to appeal to. How _many_ weekends Tomas hasn’t been on family outings with them, how the few that he have seem to always end in an argument or Ruben having a meltdown. How much of her life is solo damage control to keep the household running smoothly: the domestic tasks that Tomas never does as though working slightly longer hours than her stops him from doing the laundry once in a while. The bedtime stories he never reads. The praise he never gives, the insults that she has to call out or wallpaper over or argue against so that Ruben doesn’t take them to heart or think she agrees. It’s all on Estefanía’s shoulders, and Tomas’ weight is becoming heavier than she cares to carry.

For the first time in her relationship with him, Estefanía is wondering who the hell this man is that she married. How long has he been so disillusioned with what it means to have a child? He was as excited as she was when the test showed up positive. It can’t be that she’s spent seven years blindly gliding along on the conversations from her pregnancy and from when Ruben was still a newborn, from when Ruben was still just a canvas to project dreams onto instead of a person in his own particular way of it.

It's hard not to think that maybe she knows exactly when he became disillusioned.  That's not something she wants to believe.

She still tries to make things work for a while. Children need their fathers around, and if he only spent more time around Ruben instead of ignoring him he’d surely see that his son is wonderful. It mostly seems to cause arguments, when she tries to encourage it to happen. It takes four days to persuade Tomas to even go to the store with them.

_Even harder than trying to get Ruben out of the house when he doesn’t want to_ , she thinks dryly to herself, and of course ends up regretting that when Ruben decides that even if his dad has grudgingly agreed to Sunday morning grocery shopping that’s no reason that he should do the same.

“Maybe it’s better if we just leave it for another day,” she says, after the exhaustive effort that was trying to get Ruben to put his shoes on. 

“He’ll be fine once we’re there,” Tomas says. “We said we were going out, so we’re going out.”

“Don’t wanna,” Ruben huffs.

“Don’t care,” Tomas answers. “Come on.”

Ruben sulks in the car. Estefanía gives him his tangle and he drops it on the floor almost immediately then makes distressed whining soundsthe rest of the way because nobody can reach to get it while driving. Tomas grits his teeth, but doesn’t say anything, and Ruben settles down once they arrive and Estefanía fishes around under the front seat for his tangle to return to him.

So much for this being a simple bonding activity. Now it’s just a ticking clock, a matter of getting their groceries as soon as possible and leaving before things escalate.

They’re halfway around when a staff member with a cart meanders up the aisle to start refilling the bottles of cooking oil near them. The cart’s wheels squeak all the way towards them, the glass bottles clink loudly. Ruben hums a wavering, anxious note and rubs his ears.

“Do you need your ear defenders, cariño?” she asks and he nods, but as she digs them out of her purse Tomas says, “oh, por Dios, really? They make people think he's...y'know.”

He taps his head meaningfully. Estefanía entertains the notion of thwapping him round the head with them but hitting is not something she does, a life choice which she regrets at this particular moment.

“It’s loud in here for him,” she says, handing the ear defenders down to Ruben but Tomas takes them out of Ruben’s hands before his fingers even close properly around them.

“He doesn’t need them,” he says. 

“No,” Ruben says, panicked. “No, no, no, those are _mine_.”

“You don’t need them in here, Rubén, it’s only the store,” Tomas says firmly.

“I _need them!”_ Ruben says, his voice going increasingly high like a passing siren. “They’re mine, I need them, I need them, they’re mine! It’s loud! It’s too _loud_!”

The sound of the shelves being stacked stops and then hurriedly starts again, someone trying to pretend they hadn’t noticed anything. Other customers are looking. This never goes well. 

When Tomas kneels down to whisper “stop making a scene!”, Ruben tries to grab the ear defenders out of his hand while they're in reach. Tomas catches him by the wrist and says, “stop being so silly!”, shaking his arm hard enough that Ruben stumbles. Estefanía moves instinctively ready to catch him if he needs it, but he rights himself with his face crumpling dangerously. 

“We’re leaving _now_ ,” Estefanía says, prising Tomas’ hand off Ruben’s arm and picking Ruben up. They leave the cart in the middle of the aisle. He’s getting far too big to carry like this, but necessity is strength for mothers especially on a tight time limit. Sure enough, Ruben starts bawling halfway across the parking lot, he howls and writhes as she tries to put his seatbelt on for him, far past the point of consolation. He’s so overwrought that he ends up making himself sick from it. She rides in the back with him, holding a paper bag under his head.

Tomas storms off to their shared bedroom as soon as they arrive home, leaving it to Estefania to put Ruben in his pajamas and take him through the bedtime routine. Its only 3pm: the routine is the only way he’ll ever take a nap, though he’s exhausted enough that he falls fast asleep before she even takes a storybook off the shelf.

Estefanía is not a woman prone to anger. _A hammer will never fix broken pottery_ , her Abuelito used to tell her whenever she threw a tantrum as a child. Abuelito Max had a lot of interesting phrases many of which she thinks he made up himself just to confuse her, but whenever she gets angry she always remembers him saying this one and has taken it to mean that lashing out doesn’t resolve a problem.

Be that as it may, she is _furious_ right now. Yes, Tomas may not have hit Ruben, this time or as far as she knows any time before - he'd better pray to God she never discovers otherwise -and it may never turn into that. But Estefanía saw how tight his grip was around Ruben’s small arm and heard the tone of his voice and remembered every other time things like this have happened, and it’s more than enough for her. This really is what Ruben’s been growing up in, isn’t it? She’s been aware of it, but she hadn’t really _seen_ it.

She kisses Ruben’s head and goes to face her husband, closing the door behind her. If she’s let her son down for this long it ends right now.

“Does he really need a nightlight on when it’s still light outside?”

Stay calm. “It helps him sleep.”

“You baby him, you know. That’s why he’s so oversensitive. You have to be tougher with him or he’ll never grow out of it.”

Or, in fact, to hell with calm. “Tough like you were today?” she snaps, hammer-strong. “Tough like taking his ear defenders and pulling him around and scaring him sick, sí, what a father. A proud moment for you, I'm sure.”

Tomas is loud when he answers, “if you didn’t give him so much _attention_ for it he wouldn’t keep—“

“¡¿Perdóname?!” she says, her own volume raising to match. “Perhaps if you gave him any attention that wasn’t just _yelling_ at him he wouldn’t be so stressed all the time. I’ve let this go on too long, Tomas. Do you know, I can’t remember the last time I heard you say a kind word to him, and he tries his best. He’s doing math and science a grade above everyone else his age and when he bought his report card home last time all you asked is why he only got a B-minus in English.”

“Coño, I was _joking!_ Is it my fault the boy doesn’t understand a joke? But of course you take his side.”

“Yes, because he is seven years old and I have a heart! It isn't like he does these things to spite you, he’s a child. You know why he is this way, you only make things harder by making him self-conscious about it.”

Tomas waves an agitated hand outwards, to Ruben's bedroom down the hall. “This isn’t what I pictured when we said we’d start a family. Normal kids aren’t _like_ this, Stef.”

“Ruben is. You can’t change that by shouting at him.”

“I didn’t sign up for this! _”_

“Neither did I!” she says. “But he’s our _son_ , so you can either love him as he is or you can get out of both of our lives because I am sick of having to pick up the pieces every time you tear him down.”

She stares Tomas down until he looks away. “I’m going for a walk,” he says.

Of course he is. She doesn’t acknowledge him, just walks away to check on Ruben. His bedroom door when she gets to it is cracked a little way open. Estefanía’s steps falter for a moment. She could have sworn she closed it. 

When she pushes carefully it to peek in, there’s Ruben, wide awake with his eyes shining starlit and sad in the softly rotating constellations of his nightlight. He doesn’t look over to her.

Did he hear all of that?

***

She wasn’t expecting Tomas to take the second option. It had only been intended to shock some sense into him. In the early hours, Estefanía wakes after sleeping in their bed alone all night to the sound of him rummaging through drawers, shoving things carelessly into a suitcase.

She could ask “what are you doing?” but all considered it seems obvious. She watches him pack, wraps herself in a bathrobe and follows him as he drags his suitcases to the door.

“You aren’t going to say goodbye to him,” she states.

Tomas has the decency at least to look ashamed. “I…think this way is easier for us all.”

“Easier for the only person you care about here, ciertamente.”

“Mira, Stef…”

“Don’t call me that. Not now.”

And that’s the last conversation they have, both of them aware there's a line he's crossed too far to return from already. Not even a platitude of _I’ll come to visit him_ , not an  _I need some time_ or  _we'll talk this out_. Just his two suitcases and nine years of marriage gone as he closes the door behind him. She takes her wedding ring off and hurls it at the wood as hard as she can. It bounces off with a loud finality.

Ruben comes downstairs an hour later to find her on the sofa, still crying in her nightclothes. He hesitates uncertainly in the middle of the living room.

“Mamá, you’re sad?” he ventures.

“A little,” she says. Not as much as she should be, considering her marriage just collapsed in the space of twelve hours, or at least not for herself.

“¿Por qué?”

There’s no way to lie to him about it. “Your dad has left. We’re not going to be married any more.”

“Oh.” Ruben digests this, and climbs up to sit on the ledge of the bay window, peering down the street as though expecting to see his dad walking away. For once, he doesn’t ask _why._ “Coming back?”

“No,” she says. “No, I don’t think so, sweetheart.”

“Okay,” he says, and his small, serious face is unreadable.

***

Tomas never comes back. Things are neither easier nor harder without him. Divorce proceedings are difficult. There’s more hours of work to afford to raise a child alone, there’s more hours of wondering if she did the right thing for either of them.

Ruben flourishes at home. She wouldn’t say he seems happy, but he’s carrying less stress, less waiting on edge for someone to shout at him for something he doesn’t understand, and she stops wondering if she’s done the right thing and starts wondering if she should have done it years ago.He drops the -Chavez from his name, by his own choice. They’re both just Marcados now.

And he flourishes more than she ever thought possible at school. Of course he’s always been a clever boy, but he moves from doing work the grade above his to high-school level to college textbooks before the age of ten. Words like _prodigy_ and _genius_ and _once in a generation_ start getting thrown around freely by his teachers and it all sends Estefanía’s mind reeling. She’s not an unintelligent woman but she certainly doesn’t have the genetic predisposition to birth a genius and god knows his father’s an idiot, so this is all Ruben. She makes sure to tell him that she’s proud of him, at every piece of praise he brings home from school.

Always, always, Estefanía feels like she falls short somewhere. It’s impossible to even tell if he’s living a happy life. He’s delighted at moments: when he gets his college scholarship at fifteen ( _fifteen_!), graduation, his PhD, his new job at the hospital. He seems contented to be back home when he comes for dinner or to stay over on his rare days off. 

But there’s an eternal tiredness to him. Any respite for fun or self-congratulations or relaxation always turns so quickly back towards working, all hours of the day. Sometimes they don’t see him for weeks.

She doesn’t know how to translate her biggest question to his language: _but what are you working_ ** _towards_**? It will sound as though she’s saying his achievements aren’t enough yet. He always seems to think he isn’t enough yet.

In every way she can imagine she tries to tell him that he is, he always has been. Something always seems to get lost in translation.

***

One time, only once,Ruben brings a friend home. Or rather the friend brings himself and arrives twenty minutes before Ruben’s due back for dinner. It’ll be the first time in a month. The hospital keeps him so busy.

“You must be Ms Marcado,” the man says with a smile, shaking her hand warmly. “Lovely to meet you at last. Ruben here yet?”

“Ah, no, but never mind, never mind, always a pleasure to meet a friend of Ruben’s,” she says, though in point of fact it’s never happened before. She ushers him in anyway. Far be it from her to be an ungracious hostess to the first person from Ruben’s life she’s met since briefly crossing paths with his roommate when she visited during his PhD years. “And just Estefanía is fine. To be honest, he didn’t tell me he’d be bringing company.”

For all her boy's a genius she does know the everyday details can sometimes slip his mind in favor of bigger things. Sometimes he even forgets to tell her _he’s_ coming over.

“Oh! I’m so sorry,! We have plans later tonight, he told me to meet him here,” the man says. “And I haven’t even introduced myself, where are my manners. Jason, Dr Jason Cole. I’m the Chief of Neurosurgery at Independence Memorial. He _really_ didn’t tell you about me?”

“I’m afraid not,” Estefanía says, feeling slightly windswept. He’s very charming, in a disorienting way.

“Typical Ruben, eh, no space for anything but work. You’d have to tie him down and lock him in the basement if you wanted him to stay out of that lab, right?”

“I think even that wouldn’t keep him away for long,” she says, laughing. “But tell me, Dr Cole, how does the Chief of Neurosurgery know so much about my son’s lab habits? I wouldn’t expect your paths to cross too often.”

“You’d be surprised who you end up getting cozy with when you work in a hospital,” he says. “Me and Ruben have been spending a lot of time together recently. We’re really getting to know each other.”

_Oh!_ she realizes. Well then. Dr Cole is tall, handsome. Charming, as she said. Must be very intelligent, too, if he’s the chief of neurosurgery. Somewhat older than she’d think appropriate, perhaps, must be about a decade older than Ruben, but Ruben has always been beyond his years in many ways and Dr Cole is hardly ancient, so who is she to judge?

How _exciting_. Ruben’s so coy about his dating life. The only time he’s ever brought it up of his own accord is when he came out to her years ago. He’s never implied there might be someone specific he’s interested in, no matter how much she tries to get the information out of him.

That must why he acts so strangely once he does arrive: he’s always been so uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. At least he’s trying. And Estefanía knows he can adapt if only he lets himself, so she encourages him to go out despite his protests and the pitiful look he shoots over his shoulder as Dr Cole shuffles him out of the door. He can be so stubborn sometimes, but it will do him good, to have a break. It’ll do him good to spend time with someone nice.

***

Ruben calls her from an airport a week later. Estefanía can’t understand what he’s telling her.

“I’ll call you as soon as I land,” he says. “I’ll explain everything. I gotta go.”

***

She refuses to grieve for him.

They go back to their house after a week of hiding at her brother’s like Ruben suggested. Nothing bad happens. _Nothing_ happens. They don’t hear anything.

Mercedes crawls into bed with her that night, for the first time in many years, and whispers “Mom, what’s _happened_ to him?”

“He’ll call,” she says, because what else can she say? He said he would, and usually when Ruben says something he means it.

She files the missing persons report, but he’s fine, really, he must be. He gets busy, sometimes. He has his work, all those thoughts in his head. Things like calling slip his mind.

Things like his suitcase, which the police find at Montego Bay Airport lost and found, slip his mind.

Things like charging his unresponsive phone for a week, two weeks, three weeks or checking any of the voicemails she leaves him every day.  He’s just late, that’s all. She won’t grieve until she has reason to.

There’s talk from the hospital he worked at about some unauthorized research involving him and that Dr Cole, who is currently suspended for reasons nobody seems quite clear on. The police say they interviewed him and that nothing useful came of it. The police theorize that maybe Ruben is on the run, something about getting mixed up in a bad crowd or international drug trading or some nonsense.

“My son is _not_ a drug dealer,” Estefanía says icily. “He’s a respected chemist and a good boy.”

“We’re not saying that he’s committed any crimes,” the policeman sitting on her sofa backtracks. “Just that we have to investigate _all_ possibilities. Or he could be involved against his will. Did Ruben ever tell you anything about his work at the hospital?

“No,” Estefanía says. “He didn’t tell me anything.”

Not a damn thing. She doesn’t know what he was doing, how he was feeling, who he knows, where he’s been. She doesn’t know anything about him.

A mother is supposed to know her son better than this. She’s supposed to be able to help them find him. All she can do is light candles in the window, two every night: one for Ruben to guide him home, one to call for her own strength. Strength to wait for him, to have trust in God to protect him, to be charitable towards the callers that ring the information hotline the police set up. The charitable thing would be to assume mistaken identity instead of malice, for each of the hundreds of dead ends. Every false hope tests her faith. They say they’ve spotted him in Montego Bay, in Connecticut, in New York. They say they’ve spotted him in the Dominican Republic, in Puerto Rico, and she wishes that one were true, that maybe he just went home. If they’d only stayed there and she’d raised him in Vega Alta none of this would have happened. 

She doesn’t mean that. Not moving here would also mean she’d never have met Juan and so they would never have had Paola and Mercedes. It hurts enough to be without her son for her to imagine a life without her daughters, who she watches like a hawk every second they’re not at school. She just can’t stop wondering what she could have done differently.

***

There’s a young man at the door. Estefanía’s looking at him through the peephole. He’s small and looks deeply uncomfortable, shifting on his feet

He doesn’t look like the kind of person that would be sent to commit whatever mysterious crimes Ruben had called from the airport to warn her about. But, she supposes, not looking like a criminal would be a very useful tool for a criminal to have. 

She opens the door, with the chain on. “Can I help you?”

“Ms Marcado?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Josh Stern,” he says. “I worked at Independence Memorial Hospital with Ruben and I have something important I need to tell you.”

Past tense as in he doesn’t work there any more, or past tense as in…?

“Are you a friend of Ruben's?” she asks.

Josh is silent. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. Somehow it makes her trust him, though not enough to let him into the house. She undoes the chain and steps out to join him out front.

“I’m going to go to the police straight after this,” he says. “But I thought it only seemed right to tell you first.”

“Then tell me.”

“I used to be Dr Cole’s personal assistant. I was conducting a personal investigation into his involvement in all of this at the request of my superior Dr Young.”

“You found something?”

“Yes,” Josh says, and takes a deep breath. “Dr Cole was on the plane that Ruben caught to Jamaica. I found his credit card records. He bought two drinks.”

“So he was with Ruben?” she says, baffled. “Why? Was he… trying to help him hide from someone? The police said maybe they were involved in some business that got out of hand…but he didn’t say anything to them, why would he lie?”

“Ms Marcado,” Josh says gently. “I don’t want to, to jump to conclusions, but considering Dr Cole’s, um, interaction with Ruben just before he went missing, I don’t think he was there to help.”

“Interaction? What do you mean? The police told me that he was suspended and being investigated for being involved in some unauthorized experiments with Ruben, isn’t that—is that what you’re talking about?”

“They didn’t tell you?” Josh says, then he freezes, looking horrified. “Oh my god. They don’t _know_.”

“Know what?”

“Dr Cole wasn’t suspended just for the experiments,” Josh says, frantic. “I only found out a few days ago myself, from one of the lab techs. She saw Dr Cole attack Ruben at work and reported it. I _thought_ it was strange that Connie hasn’t been questioned yet and Dr Young didn’t say anything to me about it but I assumed — I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I thought she told them, I have to go _right now_ —"

He bolts away up the path. That same afternoon, the police call and tell her that Jason Cole has been arrested. He gave them a full confession. 

She’ll be angry, later, that the hospital withheld information that could have made a difference. She’ll be grateful later for Josh. For now all she has is a translation, far too late in coming: Ruben sullen at the dinner table, Ruben looking over his shoulder as Dr Cole leads him out of the front door of her house for the last time.

This is what she could have changed if she’d been able to read him. She didn’t _know_.

There’s so many things Estefanía doesn’t know. Like what to do next, like how the world hasn’t burned away underneath her, like how to tell her two remaining children, when they come home from school to find her sitting in the same position with her silent phone still cradled in her hands, that they no longer have an older brother.

***

Ruben’s favorite color was blue, but his favorite flowers were all yellows. Sunflowers, daffodils, dandelions. Springtime flowers, perfect for this time of year. 

The altar and the entryway at the church are lined with sunflowers.

Estefanía’s mama stands beside her to greet mourners, wrinkled hand on her shoulder strong like she’s always been, something Estefanía doesn’t know how to be any more. She remembers those hands, smoother and less age-spotted, the first time she passed Ruben over to her and said “say hello to your abuela, Rubén.”

He’d looked at his abuela and then, very solemnly, was sick all down himself.

Estefanía bites down her laugh at the memory before it can turn into tears.

Mama flew in from Rochester with Estefanía’s nephew Raul, who is sitting with her brother and sister-in-law inside. Estefanía couldn’t even say hello: they’d always said he and Ruben could have been brothers to look at them. She can’t bear to look at him.

She’d stared at the sunflowers instead when they’d arrived. She stares at the sunflowers all through the line of people shaking her hand until Ruben’s tía on his father’s side arrives, all the way from Puerto Rico with condolences but without Tomas. 

“Did you tell him?” Estefanía asks. She hadn’t been able to find any contact information. “Does he know?”

“We had a fight, we haven’t spoken for two years, you know how he is,” Teresa says, her face tight. “I don’t even know where he lives any more. I tried calling the number I have for him and I left messages, but…”

“Perhaps he changed his number,” Estefanía says dully. Neither of them say what they’re both thinking: would he have come even if he knew?

How could he not be here?

Teresa sits towards the back. Estefanía sits at the front, with her mother on one side and space for the girls and their father on the other. When Paola and Mercedes arrive with Juan, he hugs her tightly and says “oh, _Stef_ ”, and sits with them to watch over their daughters while she’s too weak to do it herself. Their marriage didn’t work out, but unlike the first one he’s a good man. He’s a good father.

Estefanía turns around a hundred times during the service, waiting for Tomas to come through the doors. Waiting for _Ruben_ to come through the doors as though it was all just a mistake. This can’t really be his memorial. There isn't even a coffin.

Perhaps she should have got one for him anyway. She didn’t know how to arrange this. Do they buy a plot of land and leave it there empty? Do they buy a headstone to sit over nothing? There isn't a body to bury. He’s out there god knows where, just abandoned.

She keeps looking, but the church doors stay closed until they walk out themselves, stepping into the spring sunlight after the service. The season seems a cruel trick. A time of new life. A time of new beginnings. There’s no grave for her to lay sunflowers on.

Ruben is dead. Her strange, sweet boy who she loved more fiercely than any fantasized construction of a child she and his absent father had dreamed up during her pregnancy, with a hand resting on the swell of her belly where her first baby slept, and now her first baby is sleeping somewhere so far from home and won’t ever wake up again.

This isn’t what she signed up for.

***

They still get calls on the information hotline, dwindling now that an arrest has been made and his death declared official. False reports, like all of them before. People who have missed the update and spotted any latino man with a beard from a distance and assumed. The police still investigate some, the ones that seem to promise more answers than whatever nonsense Dr Cole’s story had been, a confession without any real information to work with. They still don’t know when it happened, where it happened, he couldn’t even tell them _how_. It’s a body hunt now with no luck yet, but they keep looking anyway.

“We got a call today from a couple just returning from their vacation across Jamaica,” Detective Johnson says. “Woman says they travelled through Alligator Pond village a while back and on arriving to their hotel she was checked in by a staff member she believes to be your son. Says he was still going by the name Ruben, so when she saw the news articles later on she made the connection straight away."

“Okay,” Estefanía says, shifting her phone to her other ear. This place means nothing to her. 

“Which would mean she saw him alive within the past month. We’ll be investigating tomorrow, but I don’t want to raise your hopes —“

“You haven’t,” she says. “Detective, my son is dead, nobody confesses to a murder that didn’t take place. I just want to be able to lay him to rest properly. I have no hopes left to raise.”

“We’ll call you tomorrow,” Johnson says.

***

The phone rings, late the next afternoon. Just what she needs. Another goose chase, another fruitless conversation, another day with no answers, forever.

“Ms Marcado. Detective Johnson.”

“Hello, detective,” she says. “Have you followed up on the lead?”

Paola and Mercedes look up from the other sofa where they were both ostensibly reading, though Paola’s book has been hanging limply from her hand for some time and Mercedes hasn’t turned a page for half an hour. They don’t look hopeful. Or intrigued, or anything at all. They’re just looking, intensely.

“Yes. But, um…you might want to sit down for this,” Johnson says. “It will be a shock.”

“Nothing shocks me any more,” she answers. “Please just tell me what you know.”

“The tip paid off. We found him.”

“Oh,” she says blankly. She hadn’t been expecting it, though she’s been waiting. It isn't the closure she expected. Not a crushing re-realization of loss, nor a relief to be able to let him come home one last time. It just…is. “I see.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear: we found him  still working at the hotel where our informant met him, he’s been living there for two months. Ms Marcado, Ruben is alive.”

Her heart stops.

“What?” she whispers. “You’re…are you _sure_? I swear to God that if you _dare_ tell me that this is a mistake…”

Now the girls look worried: Paola grips Mercedes’ hand tightly. Estefanía won’t tell them, not until she’s certain, and she doesn’t know how to believe this. Ruben is dead. Dr Cole confessed to it. They held a memorial. He didn’t _call_ her.

“He’s been talking with our team for the past two hours, there’s no doubt at all.” Johnson says. “The first thing he did was ask about you.”

Detective Johnson was right, she should have been sitting down. She collapses heavily into the armchair behind her, tears on her face that she doesn’t remember crying.

“May I—“ her throat is dry. “May I speak with him?”

“That may not be possible at the moment. He was…very disturbed, by some of the things he had to tell us, and we had to stop the interview for a while after he became verbally unresponsive,” Johnson says. “Now, I know that sounds scary, but in highly traumatic situations such as these it's very common for—“

“No, no, that’s always happened,” Estefanía says, not wanting to think about the _highly traumatic_ part. If he really is alive, that’s all that matters, that has to be all that matters. “He’s autistic. Sometimes that means he can’t talk. I would still like to speak to him, if I may.”

Paola gasps quietly, putting the pieces together. Mercedes is still just staring.

“Of course. I’ll go and collect him, I’ll call back in a few minutes.”

“Thank you, Detective.”

She still holds the phone close to her ear even as Johnson hangs up, terrified she’ll miss the call, feeling like those first awful few week wondering every time she showered or slept or her battery died if she had missed him.

“Mom?” Paola says. “What’s happening? Was that the police, what did they say?”

“They…they say they found Rubén. He’s alive. They _found_ him, Paola.”

“ _What_?!”

“Ssh, ssh!” The phone is ringing, she answers within a second. “Rubén?”

“Your son is here. I’ll pass you over to him now.”

A rustling sound, then near-silence, but Estefanía can hear the uneven breathing on the other end even over this distance.

What do you say to a boy returned from the dead?

“Rubén? Rubén. I know you can’t talk right now, mijo, but I hope you can hear me. We’ve missed you so much, we thought—Dios, I thought I’d never get to speak to you again.”

There’s the sound of a throat being cleared, and uncertain like it’s the very first time he said it, it was his very first word as an infant, it’s the last confirmation she needs because no matter how broken the voice she’d know it: “ _Mamá_.”

It’s him.

“ _Baby_ ,” she says, weeping. “Mi querido, oh, my baby boy.”

“A-a-are…” He makes a frustrated noise. He always hates it when he stutters. “I-I-I can’t….”

“It’s okay, querido, I know.” She holds an arm out: both of her girls come to huddle underneath it, and it’s almost like they’re all together. “I know.”

He takes a shaky breath and then his voice comes back stronger. “Mamá, it’s you. It’s _you_.”

“It's me. Your sisters are both here too.”

“R-really?” he says. “Can I…”

“I’ll put you on speaker.” She clicks quickly, reluctant to stop hearing his voice even for a second. “Girls. Say hi to your brother.”

“Hi,” Paola breathes.

“ _Ruben_!” Mercedes says.

Ruben laughs, shaky. “Hey kids,” he says, nearly sounding normal, “miss me?”

“Ruben, it’s been two months,” Paola says, tearful. “It’s been two months, where were you? Why didn’t you call?”

“I—“ he says, sounding lost. “I-I meant to, b-but, there was…” and then he starts crying, abrupt and heart-wrenching and loud.

“Rubén?”

“He hurt me,” he says. “Mamá, he _hurt_ me.”

There’s a quiet commotion on the other end, and then Detective Johnson says, “I’m afraid that might have to be the end of the conversation for now, Ms Marcado. Ruben needs some rest, we’ve asked a lot of him today. We’ve got a psychiatric expert here who is helping him, he’s in good hands now.”

“Wait, wait, can I say goodbye?” She doesn’t want to say goodbye. She doesn’t want to put the phone down until he’s right back here beside her, in case she loses him again.

“Of course. Go ahead.”

“Mi Rubén,” she says. “It’s going to be okay, sweetheart, todo va a estar bien. I promise. I love you so much.”

Ruben doesn’t answer. The noise in the background fades out as Johnson says, “Ms Marcado? I know this must be a lot to take in.”  


“He’s alive,” she says, blank with overload. “He’s going to come back to me.”

“Yes. But he’s been through a lot. We’re still getting the details but you should know that when he comes home, he’s not going be the same as you remember him. Mentally or physically.”

She turns speakerphone off, leaves the living room for some privacy while the girls stare after her. 

“Tell me what happened to him,” she says.

***

It’s strange to celebrate and mourn a person both at once, not least when they’re standing right in front of you, but it’s the only thing they can do.

He’s a stranger in her house. It’s beyond understanding, it’s beyond loss, what that man did to her poor boy. How could this happen?

She used to wish she knew what he was thinking, where he was looking when his eyes stared off to somewhere she couldn’t see. She knows where he’s looking now. Oh, she knows everything, she listened to what the detective told her, she sits with Ruben through every court session and sees every picture they show of the damage, she sits outside his door through every night terror, every single night. 

As a child, after a meltdown or a bad dream, she’d check in on him every hour until she went to bed herself. Now he locks his bedroom door. Sometimes she worries that he’ll disappear behind it, somehow, that without being watched he’ll simply stop existing. Ruben doesn’t like them to look at him for any amount of time, as though that's what he wants to happen. He’ll cringe away when she glances up as he enters a room, he’ll shout and snap and cry if he feels like they’re staring.

He’s alive. It’s the only thing to cling onto when everything else is impossible. Still her Rubén. Always her Rubén. They have another appointment at the doctor’s today and he says flatly that he’s not going to go. It reminds her of when he was little trying to persuade him to go out to the grocery store. What she wouldn’t give for the only problem to be that the lights are too bright, the people are too loud.

“I know you don’t like it, but it won’t take long,” she says. What else can she do but keep begging? She can’t go over and physically pull him out of bed, though only because he would be frightened, because he’s so thin now that she probably has the strength to.

“Don’t _wanna_ ,” he says.

“I’m sorry, mijo. They need to give you a checkup, make sure that your weight is—“

“I might not have any other use but I think I’m still a competent enough doctor to weigh myself without needing help,” he snaps. He’s so angry so often, most often at himself, a hammer trying to fix broken pottery. “I put on three pounds this week, you saw the scales too, I’m not _lying_.”

“I didn’t say you were. But you can’t give yourself a blood test and—“

At the mention of a blood test he only curls up smaller, pulling his quilt around him. “I’m taking the damn vitamin supplements and the meal plan and all of it. I’m doing everything everyone keeps telling me to. Can’t you all just leave me alone?”

“Rubén, you know I just want to help you get better.”

“I don’t want you to.” He looks at her, right in the eye, and she understands him oh so clearly. “Ma, I don’t want to get better, I want it to _stop_.”

***

Estefanía fixes a small sturdy padlock on the cupboard with all the household chemicals, the key to which she’ll keep on herself at all times, and she orders electric razors off Amazon for both of the girls so that she can throw the disposable bladed ones out, and she makes Paola and Mercedes ransack their rooms for any packets of painkillers they might have lying around to be locked away with the other medicines. She’s already had to hide the block of cooking knives out of sight in the kitchen else Ruben refuses to even enter the room, but she puts a padlock on that cabinet too. 

She stands in every room and looks around for hazards with the anxious eyes of a new mother again, to the point where she finds herself thinking about plug socket covers and stairgates and foam corners for the coffee table for a deluded few seconds, as though it’s only accidents she’s still trying to protect him from.

When Ruben was a baby it seemed like one day he was barely crawling and the next he was awake at all hours toddling around with a productive kind of chaos in his wake. Attempting to make his own breakfast. Squeezing all kinds of condiments and shampoo and hand soap into bowls together to make what he’d call “my mixtures”. She had to put childproof locks on everything. He always had a child’s unerring lack of self-preservation and a scientist’s endless curiosity that made him patter straight towards the most dangerous thing in a room. 

Perhaps he never quite grew out of that.

She walks around to check the house again, just to be sure she hasn’t missed anything this time. She _has_ to be sure. Estefanía will never be able to forget that she attended the funeral of her oldest child. She will never forget that not even God can promise her she won’t have to do it a second time.

***

Estefanía doesn’t dare dream of happiness for him any more, since what good has ever come of it yet? She only hopes for the pain to be less.

Pain eases slowly. Decisions, hugs, smiles, confidence, a will to keep living, it’s a bitter battle towards all of them but all of them he strives for and in time all of them he achieves. Her Ruben just as he’s always been, he works hard at everything.

And just as he’s always been, once he finally takes wing he flies straight up aiming for the sun: things aren’t better but they’re getting easier and then one day in November he sits her down and says, “Ma, I’m moving to New York.”

_Stay low this time, Icarus_ , _please,_ she thinks, and without thinking says “you can’t do that.”  


“I can do what I want!” he says harshly, then sighs. “I’m sorry, I—”

“I’m sorry too,” she says. “I didn’t mean that you _can’t_ , I just mean, you can’t?”

“I’ve already accepted a job there.”

And when did he do that? She should be grateful, maybe, that apparently he’s more his old self than she thought, secretive and stubborn, but considering how that worked out before…

“It’s only been eight months since you got back.Sweetheart, I know things are improving and I’m happy that you’re trying to be independent but you only just started going outside by yourself in the past month. This is too soon.”

“Maybe,” he says. “I’m going to do it anyway."

“Why? _Why_?”

“I don’t want surviving to be all I do. He’s everywhere. I want my own life again. I’m gonna be subletting an apartment in Manhattan, and—“

“In _Manhattan_? You’re going to be right in the city?! Dios, I understand why you want a fresh start, but New York City is so dangerous, and you’d be living all alone.”

“Everywhere is dangerous, Mamá,” he says evenly.

If only she could say _not here, not with me_ and have it be true. He isn’t wrong. Even this house isn’t safe, not after _that_ man has walked within its walls. It isn't the time to leave yet, but mark her words, the second it’s an option she’s abandoning this place to the memories that haunt it.

Everyone needs a new start sometimes. Isn’t that why they came to this country in the first place? Her family hadn’t found a better life like she’d hoped. Maybe New York holds something for him that Philadelphia couldn’t provide.

She isn’t sure about this at all.

“I can’t stay here any more. ” Ruben says. “Please, Ma, I’ve made my choice, but I need you to…I just need you, okay?”

If he’s going to leave, how does she want him to leave? With her disapproval? With an argument?

“I hope New York is kind to you,” she says. “Truly I do. But if you ever need to come back, Rubén, remember you always have a place with us. Always.”

It’s the only thing she can offer him. She hopes that it’s enough.

***

Retrospect and regret isn’t a trap she’ll fall into again. After Ruben leaves, she makes sure to be as present as possible even across state lines, so that nothing important will be missed. She's not going to be too late again.

They talk to each other several times a week. Estefanía listens, and it’s funny but she hears so much more than she used to, he makes more sense though often the sense he makes is painful. Maybe he tells her more than he used to: they never used to talk this often, but he said he needed her, and she’s right there a phone call away.

On the bad days he cries, or sits silently while she talks to him about increasingly more mundane topics when he just needs to hear her voice.

On the anniversary of _That_ , he calls her in a state that shows her just how much better things had gotten without her awareness, because it’s like all his progress reverses for the day. She almost catches a flight out to help him, but the very mention of her getting on a plane sends him into such a spiral that she has to promise she won’t. Instead, she spends twelve hours on the phone with him, not even talking for most of it, just being there. 

On the good days, he tells her about his apartment and his new plants and the bodega where he goes nearly every day even if he goes nowhere else. And about the boy who works at the bodega, and then some _more_ about the boy who works at the bodega, and then he meets the boy from the bodega’s girlfriend so now he mostly has three subjects he talks about at length. The store, Usnavi, Vanessa.

The thing about learning a language: if you hear it for long enough you pick many things up without needing to be taught, from cadence and from context. Estefanía knows this cadence. Even when they’re on audio only she can visualize Ruben’s hands waving the shapes of words through the air like he’s moving them around, and he repeats repeats repeats his favorites: _Usnavi said this_ and _Vanessa told me that_ and _I saw Usnavi and Vanessa today, I’m going to see Vanessa and Usnavi tomorrow._

She starts to hears more about them than about him, after a while. Once or twice after a call she catches her thoughts in unexpected places, which is to say, not worrying about Ruben or Paola or Mercedes. Some days instead she’s fretting about Usnavi who apparently insisted on working today even though he has a headache so bad he could barely open his eyes. Or hoping that the presentation Vanessa’s been trying to pretend she hasn’t been nervous about goes well tomorrow, because somehow Estefanía knows every time Vanessa has a presentation tomorrow before she even knows what Vanessa looks like.

As though she needed more youngsters to get grey hairs over, but they’re the rosetta stone she’s needed, so simple all along: to understand Ruben is to listen to him talk about the things he cares deeply about. He talks about them, she learns about him.

_He told me today he’s an orphan. They got sick and he lost both of them on the same day, just before he turned eighteen. That’s how he ended up running the store. It’s just…it’s really something, isn’t it? That something so awful can happen to him and he can still be such a good person? A happy person?_

_You’d think that it’d wear her down, wouldn’t you? All the shit people do or say because they don’t bother to think of what the other person wants. But she just…keeps walking through it, all the time. It isn't that she doesn’t care what people think, really, it’s that she doesn’t let caring what people think stop her from being who she is anyway._

Estefanía could never keep up with him when it came to science no matter how hard she tried, with his once in a generation mind, but this, this she might be able to follow. On the good days Ruben tells her about his friends, and the flags on the fire escapes, and the singing, and it almost sounds like home. Sometimes, faintly, she can hear a trill behind his R that speech therapy for his stutter and those careful lines drawn between his languages had covered over almost two decades ago.

And Estefanía’s no fool, so when she’s talking to him on Skype and he’s squirming around like he’s sitting on a seat full of snakes and doesn’t mention Usnavi or Vanessa once for ten whole minutes, she knows somethings up.

“Is something bothering you, mijo?”

He gives her an uncomfortable look, not so much PTSD as it is a lot closer to “I spilled chemicals on the floor even though you told me to stop doing science in the living room and now there’s a giant hole in the carpet and I have to confess”. And she should know, she’s extremely familiar with that look.

“I have to tell you something,” he says, and then he just mumbles inaudibly for a while before shaking his head. “Sorry. I’m nervous. It’s good news, though. Or, _I_ think it’s good news.”

“Ah. And I won’t?”

“I don’t know, he says. "It’s maybe gonna just be weird news for you. Maybe."

He pulls his knees up to his chest and hides his face and says, indistinctly, “I'm in a relationship.”

“RUBÉN MANUEL MARCADO,” she shouts, out of sheer surprise. He ducks off to the side, then pokes his head back onscreen.

“Ma, that wasn’t even the part you were meant to freak out at yet!” he says, but how could she not? When she last saw him in person just over five months ago was still so jumpy at touch, and a year ago couldn’t even bear to be looked at, and how does that work with dating, and _who_ is he dating? She tries to think through all the people she’s heard him mention who might be single, but there's nobody that fits. If it weren’t for them already being with each other she would have assumed Vanessa or Usnavi, of course. Ruben hasn’t talked about anyone else nearly so much.

“Then what is the part I was supposed to “freak out _”_ at, por favor? You’re _dating?_ Who? For how long? Have you told me about them? Boy or girl?”

“Yes,” Ruben answers, mysteriously. “And three weeks.”

“Yes to which question?”

“Yes, I’ve told you about them. And also yes to the second one. About a boy or a girl.”

“You are being very obscure, mijo, and I really don’t need it.”

He smiles, something about it turned inward as though it's private just for him rather than for her benefit. “I’m. uh, I’m dating…Usnavi. And also Vanessa. Boy _and_ a girl.”

“Both?”

“Both."

“Do they _know_?”

Ruben bursts out laughing. “About me dating the other one, or about me dating them? Of course they know, Ma, it’s all three of us. Together.”

He bumps the heels of his hands against each other a few times, waiting for her opinion. He’s nervous, but composed, far more so than when he came out as bisexual.

Dating two people at once isn’t how Estefanía understands the world to work, just as she didn’t understand how someone can like men and like women, or a lot of things about him.

Why should it always be about what she understands? She’s always wanted him to have someone who he enjoys spending time with, who will take good care of him. Now he has two someones, and isn't _more_ love what he deserves, and what ingratitude to complain about it just because the circumstances are unconventional. Of course they are. Ruben is unconventional. All that matters is he’s happy, and sometimes these days she dares to dream again he might be one day.

“Well then,” she says, “sounds like you’ll be _very_ busy, hm?”

“ _Ma, shush_!” he says, looking around like he’s checking for eavesdroppers. No matter what happens, her ability to pull that adolescent embarrassment out of him remains in tact, as is her maternal right. “You’re not allowed to say things with that voice, it’s _weird.”_

“Espera...are they there right now?”

“Uuum,” Ruben says, shiftily. “Nooo? Well, yes, fine, they’re in the kitchen, for…in case.”

For in case she didn’t react well. Really. When will he learn that she’ll love him no matter what?

“I’d better text and tell them things are okay, actually,” he says. “They probably heard you yelling the whole house down. Uh, things _are_ okay, right, I didn’t misinterpret that?”

“Things are wonderful,” she says. “I know they’ve been good to you, that's the only thing that matters. Are they going to stay in the kitchen?”

He taps around on his phone. “I think yes, for today. No offense. Asking them to meet the family after three weeks is a bit forward. But I promise you’d like them. I like them. And I guess they like me.” He laughs, disbelieving delight wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. “So it’s good. Everything’s…pretty good right now."

In the background of his Skype call she hears movement from a distance away. The sound of things being dropped, mostly.

“That’ll be Usnavi,” Ruben says. “I told them to tidy up breakfast while they were in there since they don’t need to keep listening in on us.”

They talk a little longer, about how, about when, and then from the same background-noise room comes a boy’s voice singing, scratchy in places but with a lot of heart, a girl’s voice pretty and smooth rising alongside. Something else gets dropped, cutting off the song while one of them laughs loudly. Ruben trails off halfway through a word and gazes offscreen, distracted, smiling. 

Estefanía doesn’t mind. She knows exactly what he’s looking at, with his eyes so far away.

**Author's Note:**

> [content warnings:
> 
> ableism re: ruben's autism, largely from his father who is a Terrible Jerk about the whole thing. his mom is well-meaning but misguided about it at first, but she learns and is never terrible, just confused sometimes.
> 
> ymmv but i would consider ruben's dad as emotionally abusive. he's not here for the whole fic but when he is he sucks.
> 
> also deals with ruben's PTSD/suicidal impulses, and the part where his family believes him to be dead and are mourning him. he comes back, obvs, so not actual character death, but still.]
> 
>  
> 
> [leave a comment if you liked it!]


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